


Kogamian Dialectics

by SaintIere



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: Academic nonsense, Angst, Discussions of War, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fascism, Graphic Description of Corpses, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Racism, Slow Burn, slightly canon divergent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:35:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29643795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaintIere/pseuds/SaintIere
Summary: Kogami had embraced being a beast, a wolf that sated itself on carnist violence. It allowed him to vent the feelings of frustration and revenge that festered and corrupted his hue. It gave him the avenue to dirty his hands, if only to keep the others as clean and unclouded as possible. It seemed like a fitting punishment for his failure and for how far he had fallen.Even so, he was ever the investigator, and his new status granted him the mental freedom he needed. The human mind was its own puzzle, and he was skillful in his craft. His newest conundrum was a refugee-turned-professor, with a strangely static hue and a problematic history of turning down Sibyl. With a looming terrorist threat, it was in his best interest to figure this woman out. Scintillating conversation aside, he knew that she could not only help him in this case, but with thatotherone. It was simple. A working relationship.Though, perhaps, he was just a hound who found a new toy.
Relationships: Kougami Shinya/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	1. Prologue: In medias res

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I watch this series instead of writing my thesis? Yes. Did I plan an entire fanfic with citations because I am a doctoral scholar sociologist with a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology? YES I FUCKING DID.
> 
> For those who would like more of a nerdy context: I’m a Global South researcher with a passion for studying late-stage capitalism and decoloniality. Hence, this whole series is extremely fascinating to me. I’m hoping to develop more nuanced themes than simply throwing in quotes here and there for the fun of it, so we’ll see how successful it is without becoming my second dissertation. That being said, however, barring the prologue, this fic will have endnotes because I could not help myself.
> 
> Dates are all YYYY.MM.DD as per the wiki's timeline :)

[2113.01.07]

It had been the longest fortnight of her life as an Inspector thus far; Akane spent most of it going to her routine hue checks, then staring at the holodecor in her apartment as Candy fluttered around with sickening sweetness. She had dreamt of that night—of the cold, rusting grate of the bridge under her knees, the useless weight of the Dominator in her hands. The thick, iron laden smell of Yuki’s blood. Still, even more vivid was the empty, dispassionate look on Makishima’s face—the smooth candour of his voice as he explained how _disappointed_ he was in her. Each time she wakened, the sinking feeling in her chest, the panic and utter hopelessness would subside in time. It was replaced more and more with purpose, until now she could open her eyes with the echo of that memory and feel only a sense of determination. That alone had made her time away from the office absolutely arduous. Creating a mental list of any suitable excuse, Akane swiftly ate her breakfast, gratefully bid Candy goodbye, and let her car drive her to the MWPSB headquarters.

She put on her most professional face when she entered the office; Yayoi, Masaoka and Kagari, as expected, were at their desks—though she was surprised to see that Kogami was there too. Despite still recovering from the shotgun injuries, he sat in his usual manner, staring into his monitor, though without the cigarette between his lips.

“Good morning, everyone.”

“Inspector Tusnemori, you understand that you have a remaining three days on medical leave?” Ginoza studied her over the top of his glasses, and Akane smiled uncomfortably.

“I know, I just needed to do something,” she admitted. “I don’t expect to be put back into the field yet, of course, but my hue is clear, so I thought I could maybe catch up on some paperwork.”

“Fine, though remember that you,” Ginoza’s icy gaze slipped to Kogami, “need to consider your health properly if you are to be of service to the division.”

“Yes, sir,” she nodded enthusiastically. “I heard about those strange cases on the net,” Akane pulled up her chair, and swiftly logged in to the system. “People are saying assaults and even murders have happened without the police drones even doing anything.”

“I see the chatter is as bad as we thought,” Ginoza said. “Yes, we have had isolated reports around the city. We aren’t sure what’s happened, we have scant surveillance footage thanks to a plethora of issues—which all together makes me believe that these incidents are connected.”

“Makishima,” Kogami said quietly. “He would be able to pull something like this off.”

“Probably, but as I said, we need more information,” Ginoza continued. “As of now, we have been put on patrol. Given how few of us there are, we need to be smart about it so that if an incident does happen, we can be on the scene as quickly as we can.”

“So, we’ll need a team scouring the net for chatter,” Kagari said. “Shion is good but she’ll need help with all that data if we’re doing this _and_ all the normal shit.”

“It’s been noted,” Ginoza said. He began to say something else, but his eyes dropped to his wrist, where a call flashed on his wristcom. “This is from the chief; I’ll return soon. Inspector Tsunemori, keep an eye on them.”

“Yes sir,” Akane agreed. She slid off her chair, and moved towards the automated drink machine, where she ordered a cup of coffee.

“You’d think we were toddlers,” Kagari said. “But anyway—how’s it even possible that your hue is okay since the case?”

Akane shrugged. “I don’t know, I suppose I just deal with things differently.”

“Let’s see what your stress level is,” Kagari’s face brightened up. “Come on, it’ll take a minute.”

“I checked it a day ago,” Akane told him.

“Fine, then Ko, put your hand on the screen.”

Kogami sighed, but he acquiesced. The computer smoothly whirred to life, outlining his heart rate, blood-oxygen, his crime-coefficient, and his current stress level, which remained within the normal range.

“You even took getting shot well,”

“How long do you have before they clear you for field duty?” Akane asked him.

“Another week,” Kogami said. “Or that’s what I told them that I was willing to accept, anyway.”

Akane smiled to herself, stirring the coffee as she sat down. Of course, he wouldn’t be able to sit still in a hospital bed with the breakthroughs they made. She thought to chide him a little about it, though she wasn’t in a lofty position to do it herself. Kagari was still going on about something, when suddenly, Kogami’s stress reading spiked, signalled by the disapproving beep of the computer. Akane stopped mid-sip to stare at it, before her eyes slowly moved to the man. He was glaring out into the hallway, steely eyes absolutely seething at whatever he saw there; his hands were clenching the edge of the table in a white-knuckled grip. Akane looked to Yayoi, then to Masaoka, who both immediately diverted their attention to the collection of PSB members in front of the office. They both cringed.

But what was this about? _Did Makishima just waltz in or something?_

The group outside consisted only of three people; the first was Inspector Aoyanagi, Enforcer Kozuki, and a woman that she didn’t know. The stranger was a foreigner, clad in a flowy sort of black skirt that hung to her calves, a long-sleeved blue blouse, and short black heels; clearly not an on-duty Inspector or Enforcer herself. Kogami hadn’t taken his eyes off the group the whole time, and Akane could only continue to gape at him when he stood and made a beeline for the doorway, walking far too quickly for someone nursing buckshot wounds. A half-formed admonition froze on her tongue as she was cut off by a gleeful voice.

“Oooh, things are going to get spicy,” Kagari craned his neck to watch the Enforcer’s furious stride out the door.

“What in the world is going on?” Akane was halfway out of her own chair.

“You should go get him,” Yayoi said quietly. “Before he does something stupid.”

“Isn’t there anything you can tell me before I go out there?”

Kogami had already reached the group. Aoyanagi Risa took a single look at him, shook her head, and pulled her Enforcer off, leaving the rather mismatched pair standing in silence with one another. The young woman brushed dark hair behind her ear and considered Kogami in a borderline unfriendly manner.

“It’s too long of a story for now,” Masaoka said. “Just go out there, she looks mad and she barely ever looks mad.”

“No, no,” Kagari waved him off. “Let her be mad.”

Feeling as though she should have taken Ginoza up on the extra days off, Akane stomped out of the office. Kogami didn’t tear his eyes away from the woman when the hissing sound of the glass door slid through the tense air.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“I’ve been reinstated temporarily,” the woman’s voice was calm, though it carried a cold bite. Masaoka was right, she was angry, but it seemed bitterly personal. “You and an Inspector are out of the field, so they had to retain the part-time consultants.”

Kogami’s gaze wavered for the first time, sliding from the woman’s face towards the wall, where he closed his eyes, like a frustrated child counting to ten, furrowing his brow. His voice was quiet, deliberate as though he was trying to keep himself in check. “You mean that you were brought back because I was injured.”

“Because you got shot.” She said pointedly. He opened his eyes, looking at her with a muscle jumping in his stiffened jaw.

“You don’t understand what’s going on here,” he told her. “They shouldn’t have brought you in.”

“That wasn’t your call, or mine,” she said simply. “I’m needed upstairs.”

Kogami watched her walk off, his hands bunched into fists at his sides. Akane approached him as diplomatically as she could.

“Mr. Kogami?”

“Tell Gino I’ve gone back to the dorm,” he said. With that, a beleaguered Inspector Tsunemori was left in the hallway by herself, feeling rather as though she had whiplash.

Inside, Kagari was grinning. “I’m a little disappointed at how boring that went, but I have a lot of hope that things will get seriously entertaining from now on.”

Akane slumped into her chair, pulling her now tepid coffee towards herself. “Could someone explain to me what just happened? Should I go after Mr. Kogami and see if he’s alright?”

Kagari snorted, while Masaoka gave her a sympathetic look.

“Remember what I told you back at the factory? About things you shouldn’t bring up?” Yayoi asked mildly.

“I see,” Akane said quietly. “Well then, can one of you clue me in? I’ve never seen him act like that.”

“We don’t know the full story either,” Masaoka said. “Best not to gossip about it right now though, before _you know who_ comes in and hears us.”

“Oh right, I forgot about him,” Kagari’s face lit up again. “God this is funny.”

“Missy, just let Ko be by himself for a bit,” Masaoka said. “Think he needs time to lick his wounds...the new ones and a couple he thought he healed. Let him be ashamed of himself for a bit.”

Akane saw her own, perplexed face reflected in the glare on the glass door. “Ashamed?”

“Don’t think too hard on it; remember Rousseau? He said, ‘Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it’. Put it this way: Ko talks a big game, but he had some issues with that principle,”

Ginoza’s figure appeared from the periphery, and the sound of the door cut through Akane’s troubled thoughts.

“Let it be for now,” Masaoka said with a tired smile. “Because believe me, the whole thing is a crapshow.”

At his desk, the senior Inspector gazed around the room. “Things are getting worse out there. We haven’t quite figured out why these criminals can’t be targeted by the scanners or the Dominators, but the chief has confirmed we need to be on the streets in shifts. Tsunemori,” he turned to his colleague, who broke out of her reverie at once. “Division one is up for patrols later tonight. Until you’re cleared for duty, we’ll be bringing in some other help, but you and Kogami may stay in the analyst room as support.”

“Of course, sir,” she nodded. It occurred to her that Inspector Ginoza hadn’t even bothered to ask where Kogami was—as though he knew what had happened already.

“Hound four will be with me. We’ve received word that Enforcers from Division Three have volunteered to pick up the slack for Kogami,” he said. “Hounds one and two, as the most experienced Enforcers left, you’ll be paired with temporary Inspector de Certeau.”

Kagari spluttered into his coffee mid-sip, doubling over with silent laughter. Ginoza simply ignored him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our prologue is, as its name implies "in medias res", or in the middle of things. This fic will take a journey back and see how this whole shitshow got here :)


	2. Un plébiscite de tous les jours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In 2110, a terrorist bombing rocks the very faculty that Kogami Shinya studied in. Division One is tasked with aiding the investigation by taking charge of one of the survivors: a naturalised foreigner, who came out of the attack with a clear, unchanged hue. Their new arrival is intriguing in her own right, but Kogami senses that there is more at play regarding their superiors' eagerness to assign a civilian to the CID.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is an adapted quote from French historian Ernst Renan, who spoke about social constructivism and its role in nation-building. His general feeling was that nation states are made by memories—shared canons of common suffering as well as common victory and glory, which set an aspirational tone for creating future stories that keep the canon alive. Renan also thought that the nation was made continuously through “a daily plebiscite”, where members of the state routinely re-evaluated their loyalties to the common will.  
> To read more ;)  
> Marx, A. W. (2003). Faith In Nation. New York: Oxford University Press.

_“Unity is always effected by means of brutality” – Ernst Renan, “What is a Nation?”, 1882_

[2110.11.05]

Kogami Shinya was barely seated at his desk before the chaos began. Across the room, their newest Enforcer Kagari swivelled noisily, wondering aloud about _why_ Ginoza saw it fit to haul all his Enforcers in at once; Yayoi grew impatient first, and smacked him across the head with her music notebook. Masaoka grumbled about the early hour under his breath, uttering a curse that was timed rather too well with the arrival of Inspector Ginoza Nobuchika. Unharried and unsullied as always, he peered over his glasses at them with utter and plain distaste. Kogami lit another cigarette and remained quiet—the terseness was par for the course with Gino, however his old partner could _tell_ that he was extra-harassed this morning, despite his otherwise pristine exterior. He wouldn’t have wanted to deal with this unruly pack at this hour otherwise, nor would he be in the exact same suit that he’d worn the night before. It appeared he hadn’t gone home at all when the shift ended. This alone was strange—after all, where would an Inspector go without his dogs?

 _Probably somewhere higher up, where animals aren’t allowed in_.

“Alright, be quiet,” Ginoza shot a glare towards Kagari, who stopped his chair mid-circle with a grin. “I have a briefing to give, and the sooner we’re all clear on the information, the sooner everyone can leave again.”

“Sounds ominous,” Masaoka said. “They haul you up to see the chief, then?”

“As I said, Enforcer, I’d like to proceed smoothly,” Ginoza replied acidly. “Which means without interruption.”

Masaoka raised his hands in mock-surrender and smiled placidly. Always one to take Gino’s shots without complaint, he simply lapsed into attentive silence; Kogami let out a puff of smoke and blinked through the fog as the Inspector brought the large holo screen down.

“This has been kept as quiet as humanly possible,” Ginoza said, “to preserve the mental health of the general populace—”

“Oh, the big explosion at the Nitto School for the Social Sciences!” Kagari said loudly.

Ginoza fixed him with a seething look.

“Sorry, sorry,” Kagari leaned back in his chair, his expression signally anything _but_ apology.

“It seems the rumour mill has somehow caught up,” Ginoza said dispassionately. “As I was saying, this incident, both in scope and in intent are being kept quiet. The current news has billed this as an unfortunate accident; however, we have reason to believe it was a targeted domestic terrorist attack,” he clicked to the first picture. Kogami felt a strange tug in his chest at the sight of the campus; it brought him back, briefly, to that simpler, more hopeful time in his life—it hadn’t been _that_ long ago, but like the man in front of him tersely listing casualty reports, things had changed irrevocably.

The complex was large and spaciously built, meant to relax and attune students to the task of learning about the human condition. Sibyl-approved art and architecture sought to shift the campus away from drab utilitarianism, though, it still felt rather soulless at times. The picture on their screen was on a hall Kogami recognised as the main lecture hall—meant for large commencements and other events, rather than actual teaching. He’d sat in there only a few times: when he was matriculated, when he saw a professor give the inaugural lecture after attaining the title—and of course, at graduation. In the picture, there was a gaping, smoking hole through one of the walls, with soot-damage marring the rest of the light exterior.

Ginoza clicked to the next picture. “The damage was controlled; as you can see, it was focused on a few places,” the inside of the hall was pure chaos. Chairs, shoes, and body parts were strewn everywhere. Blood and char marks darkened the light brown wooden floor, where Kogami could count at least three discrete bombing sites: one at the entrance which caused the hole, one at the stage where the podium should have been, and a larger one in the front row. “The victims are wide-ranging, but we believe the targets to be,” the picture changed to three faces, two of whom he recognised. “Professor Hiragi Sazae, age fifty-three, the head of the faculty of Psychology,” he pointed to the middle-aged woman’s photo. Kogami remembered her well enough—she didn’t teach during his days there, but he remembered her handing him his certificate upon completion of the programme. The next victim was much younger, a stern-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair despite his generally boyish face. “Dr Inamori Mikitada, age thirty-nine, lecturer in the new Psychosocial Studies and Testing department and finally,” he gestured to the last picture, an elderly man—another face that Kogami remembered from ceremonies and events. “Chancellor Hisanaga Terumori, age sixty-five. This is what was left of their remains when recovered.”

The screen switched from their discernible faces to an assortment of crime-scene videos, showcasing various bits and pieces of clothing, charred flesh and bits of identifiable limbs. Of the lot, it seemed as though Higari Sazae was left the most intact—she had been found near the door of the hall where the wall had also been blown out.

“Damn,” Kagari whispered under his breath.

“In addition, we had seven other casualties. Four who were sitting around Chancellor Hisanaga, one near the doorway along with Higari, and two who were trampled to death in the melee,” Ginoza said. He moved to the next set of pictures, consisting of more bodies in varying states of completeness, as well as two unfortunate souls who were bloodied and sprawled on the floor. At each juncture, the name, age and last Psycho-Pass reading of each victim was displayed.

“The decedent near the doorway is a bit hard to identify at the moment, but our best indications are that it was a student by the name of Rosei Gunshi.” The holographic screen flickered to show them a handsome young man with neatly combed back dark hair.

Kagari raised his hand like a schoolboy.

Ginoza let out a sharp breath. “What.”

“Can we ask questions now?”

The Inspector seemed torn between giving into his annoyance and considering a proper answer; Kogami felt a surge of amusement, though it was quickly overtaken by cerebral dissection as he considered the photos.

“Fine, but they should be relevant.”

“Why did this Rosei guy get the special treatment?” Kagari asked. “You zoomed through the other six collateral damage victims, but he’s a special case. You don’t think he was collateral damage.”

“No, we don’t,” Ginoza acquiesced. “Aside from the damage to his body being more in line with that of the other two targets, we think the explosive was on him.”

“So, the explosives were small and kept say, under the chairs or at the podium,” Kogami volunteered. “The one in the front row is a lot bigger, and took out about five people, and I expect injuring a lot more.” Ginoza flicked back to the crime scene photos. “In an event in the main hall, the VIPs sit at the front. I would expect that Dr Higari was seated next to the Chancellor, right?”

“Right. This was the commencement address for a new department in her faculty.” Ginoza nodded. “For one reason or another, she got up and was about to exit the hall as the explosions occurred. We believe Rosei Gunshi had another device on his person and intercepted her.”

“A suicide bomber,” Masaoka stroked his chin with his cybernetic hand. “I haven’t seen one of those in a while. It looks like a focused, political attack. Bombs are used to either do a lot of damage, make a statement, or both. The people who did this left folks alive, so I’m going to bank on this being primarily a statement of some kind.”

“What do we know about Rosei Gunshi?” Yayoi asked. “When was his last screening?”

“This was what made us all the more suspicious,” Ginoza said. “It was more than three months prior. He had been avoiding the scanners somehow. We’re still in the process of interviewing his classmates, teachers and the like, but we are seeking to build a picture of what his motives may have been.”

“This was a group effort,” Kagami said. “Lone wolves rarely make this kind of precision attack where their only Plan B is dying themselves. If suicide were a part of the plan, it would have been grander, or a last resort. He was a small fry in this whole thing; I’d bet those bombs were on timers and he thought he had no choice but to use his spare device on Higari before she got away. The cooler head who planned this would have gotten her elsewhere, but he acted like a scared and desperate kid.”

“It’s true,” Masaoka said. “Running up to her and just blowing himself up is a lot more disorganised than the cerebral act of placing and timing bombs, knowing the floor plan and timing it _exactly_ right to get the guy on the podium.”

“But all that aside,” Yayoi said. “Why are we looking into this? Isn’t this a little out of our jurisdiction?”

“I was getting to that,” Ginoza said. “All bystanders and surviving injured victims were taken in for treatment. All showed signs of clouding, with the most extreme being detained as latent criminals. The level of precision in this crime has caused the lead investigators to seek us out to take over the case for now—because I have attended this university myself,” Ginoza’s gaze settled onto Kogami, his eyes cold. “And because Enforcer Kogami was a former member of this very faculty. There is also an additional complication that I was personally asked to oversee.”

“Oh, this sounds fun,” Kagari said with such mirth, it earned him a pinch across the table from Yayoi.

“We have one survivor who will be transferred to our division,” Ginoza explained, swiping to the next page with a curt motion. The new information listed the biographic data and picture of a young foreigner who was swarthy-skinned, dark-haired and hazel-eyed.

“De C-certea-” Kagari fumbled over the words, blinking more rapidly with each repetition as though it could make his task easier.

“Her birth name is Avicenna de Certeau, the given name comes first,” Ginoza cut across him with slight impatience. “Sibyl has given her the name Senna when she became naturalised,”

“Cute, but a lot less cool-sounding,”

“Stick to the topic.” Ginoza snapped. He fixed his eyes towards the screen again, the glare obscuring his eyes as he explained. “She was accepted as a refugee at age fourteen, as the Sibyl system deemed her acceptable for admission and high in aptitude. Since then, she has been in the care of a state-run school for girls until she graduated at age eighteen.”

“So, no parents,” Masaoka mused.

“No,” Ginoza said. Another curt flick of his fingers, and two sets of biodata from an asylum application took shape alongside the woman’s. “They were denied entry due to their hues and sent her alone. She has since been working at the higher educational institute, doing both teaching and research. Our information has deemed her worthy of more investigation; she was shown to display aptitude to join the Public Safety Bureau, but instead she chose to join the institute.”

Kogami frowned. “So, the system is looking at her for signs of trauma or betrayal. Or to put it plainly, it’s searching itself for flaws.”

Kagari blinked. “Betrayal? She teaches a bunch of stuffy nerds.”

“The educational institutions of the country are an incredibly high-risk area,” Ginoza said. His sharp gaze passed over Kogami, but he seemed keen to ignore his last comment, if only for the sake of remaining on topic. “Sibyl monitors teachers closely, and this scrutiny tends to become more pointed as the level of that education rises. We’ve had ample evidence of professors and students who have had their hues clouded simply by sitting in a class. Compromised teachers have also been shown statistically to cloud the hues of their students.”

“That first name of hers is an ancient philosopher,” Kogami pointed out. “So, her parents were probably educated, and since they weren’t from here, we don’t know what the extent of her prior or ideology is.”

“Why would Sibyl take that risk?” Yayoi asked. “The system regiments everything from music to fiction. It weighs personal aptitude among other factors like family history when recommending jobs.”

“Was that what you meant then?” Kagari swivelled his chair towards Kogami. “About Sibyl looking at itself for flaws.”

“It never had a reason to completely bar her from what she had an aptitude in,” Ginoza posited, cutting Kogami off before he could open his mouth. “But I imagine when she made the choice to begin teaching the system likely considered her high risk. This is just the system working as it was intended to, nothing more and nothing less.”

“That doesn’t explain how this girl is the only one out of every victim in this scenario whose hue remained effectively the same. Everyone else is clouded,” Masaoka rubbed the side of his face, metal fingers moving across the scar at his lip. “There are drugs that do this, but of course, the doctors probably thought of that. That being said, there are cases of people _appearing_ fine like this after severe trauma. They term it an acute, delayed stress response. They’re like bombs themselves, inert one second and then _boom_.”

“They have had her under strict observation since the incident,” Ginoza said. “Nothing. But, for now, Sibyl has re-evaluated her aptitude and with the risk, considers it untenable for her to be sent back to her post until more time has elapsed. That aside, Rosei Gunshi was one of her students and thus she’s a person of interest anyway. The chief has consulted with me about the next steps: until this case is solved and we discover if this woman is indeed a risk, she will be assigned to my care.”

“Wait,” Kagari held up a hand. “She’s being sent here because her criminal coefficient is too _low_ for what happened to her?”

“Because, as Enforcer Masaoka pointed out, there are ample cases of victims having delayed drops in their mental health. Your job, as usual for bloodhounds of your type, is to keep a keen eye on her for that change, and further, to figure out if she had anything to do with this case.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get that,” Kagari said. “But if she is just weirdly resilient, they’re sending her here to be an Enforcer. A job given to, well,” he gestured widely to his cohorts, “people who aren’t saveable. They give us this job _because_ you can’t salvage us. What’ll that do to her?”

Ginoza frowned. “That isn’t your concern. Your concern is to figure out if she was involved and for signs of delayed trauma. She’ll arrive tomorrow.”

With that, the Inspector turned on his heel and exited the room without another pause, casting nary a glance at the faces of his Enforcers, whose expressions varied from general bewilderment to mild irritation. Kogami sighed, rising from the chair to follow him out. His long strides caught him up to Ginoza quickly, who noticed him with the single quirk of an annoyed eyebrow and continued to walk without slowing his pace.

“Their plan is to get her at the MWPSB and keep her here, isn’t it?” Kogami said. “They could have kept her in isolation in a psychiatric institution, where she’d be safe from contaminating her hue. Instead, she’s being tested out here to see if she can withstand it. Sibyl showed her aptitude for the bureau was higher than for teaching, so the higher ups are using that.”

Ginoza scoffed. “The chief mentioned that she could be an asset, but that all depends on if you all do your jobs.”

“The perfect match for this place,” Kogami gave a bitter smile. “If she can’t be swayed at all, she’d—”

“Never end up like _you_.”

\---

Kogami was on duty the very next morning when Inspector Ginoza shepherded in their newest hound. For her introduction to the unit, all the Enforcers were present again, creating the sense that she would be walking right into an interrogation. Which, in a sense, was true. The whole thing remained absolutely ridiculous, but Gino seemed less than willing to second-guess his superiors at this juncture. He wanted to believe the system was doing what it thought as right, and that the chief et al. had a greater purpose for sending them a perfectly healthy woman without even training her first.

_Learning on the job was one thing, but this was veering into being suspicious._

Regardless of how understaffed the MWPSB was, this was irresponsible. Kogami had pored over every bit of information they could find on this woman, and thus, he’d developed a sense of who she portrayed herself to be. Now, he’d have to see if the real thing matched up. When the pair entered the office, the hounds honed in, studying her every move. They’d all been briefed about her hue checks before her arrival, and her last at the door remained the same: clear lilac. Sibyl had designated her in-between the blue and the pink spectrums, signalling that she was a mix of the more logically, justice-driven blue and the more caring, nurturing pink. It wasn’t surprising that the system deemed her suitable for teaching—after all, a measure of both qualities would mean a professor who was both highly capable as a mentor but also one who was driven by a sense of duty. What was strange, though, was that it tried to have her join the PSB. Purple-hued Inspectors weren’t unheard of, but their ilk was mostly chosen from among the more justice, duty and logic-oriented hue spectra.

He took a moment to give her the once-over, compiling an initial profile that he could compare to what he knew of her life history. Avicenna was a fairly diminutive figure, with dark waving hair that was cut to her jaw. It was a stylish, but practical choice—it fit with everything else thus far, from her well-tailored suit to the addition of light pink polish to her nails. Her eyes were a bright hazel, sweeping around the room to take in her surroundings as she listened to Ginoza. This was the first anomaly—she was apprehensive, but her mannerisms were not average. Instead of the usual tunnel vision or the skittish, jittery eye-movements of frightened civilians, hers were purposeful and systematic. Though he could plainly tell that she felt threatened, she appeared calm, her gait slow and deliberate, betraying no hesitation. These were skills—practiced and made to be almost natural-looking. Almost.

_Not something that a lecturer would learn on the day-to-day grind._

“You’ll be used on a probationary basis as I see fit,” Ginoza explained. “Whether as an analyst or in the field.”

Her eyes settled on Yayoi. She seemed to find nothing amiss, but then, she looked at _him_. In a flash, he detected it—a thrill of adrenaline that had stalled her breath for a moment, likely because he had put no effort into hiding his calculating stare. He saw no reason to—after all, if Gino wanted them to suss her out, one of the easiest ways forward was to see how she handled being unseated. She was at her most vulnerable at the moment in a new place, and he would have been a fool to pass up the opportunity. Her reaction was tempered quickly, her trepidation disappeared behind a more neutral expression, though she kept him warily within her line of sight.

“These are the Enforcers,” Ginoza said. “You will be technically within their ranks, though you will not be issued a Dominator until later. As this investigation is immediately pressing, we won’t waste time,” he gestured to the empty terminal on the other side of Kogami. “You can set up your workspace there.”

Masaoka was the first to give her a comforting, easy smile. “Don’t be too nervous, Miss. I’m Masaoka Tomomi. That one is Kunizuka Yayoi, the little hyper one in the corner is Kagari Shusei and the human chimney you share a desk with is Kogami Shinya.”

“It’s nice to meet all of you,” she said with a polite bow. “You already know my name, but I’m Avicenna de Certeau. You can all call me Senna if it’s easier.”

Her voice was quiet, with only a hint of an accent to her Japanese; she took her assigned seat without pause, though Kogami registered the way she angled herself to keep both him and the exit in view, as though it was as routine as breathing.

“As I have mentioned to Ms. de Certeau, time is of the essence. You’ve all been briefed on the situation thus far; with her presence, we can begin discussing the possible motive and consolidate our ideas immediately,” Ginoza flicked the holo on. “We’ll start with a few questions for you. Why did your parents choose to send you here?”

It was an invasive question, but she didn’t miss a beat. “We’d been travelling constantly for years. We ended up on the other side of the world because of displacement. Each time it happened, it was harder and harder to find a place to stay—we went from being in a ghetto in Europe for three years to having to journey across half of Asia in one year. We were running out of places to turn to.”

“And they sacrificed their own safety to send you alone. How did it make you feel that the Sibyl system took you in but not them?”

“Back then? Scared,” she admitted. “I was alone, I didn’t know how to speak to people and I was always worried about them. Now, I feel as though I’ve come to terms with it. I have a purpose being here.”

Kogami exchanged a look with Gino—for a moment that unspoken collegiality was resurrected, where the Inspector handed him the baton with wordless confidence. “Is that why you refused to join the Public Safety Bureau? You would be an extension of the Sibyl system, the very one that separated you from your family.”

Avicenna frowned, though she answered calmly. “I liked reading and teaching. That’s really it.”

“And what feelings do you have about one of your students being a bomber?”

That gave her pause—she looked sad, mournful. “I didn’t think he was the type.”

“How well did you know him?” Kogami lit another cigarette, leaning back in the chair as he maintained eye contact.

“I taught him twice. He was a quiet, attentive student, not one to stand out in his ideas or his personality.”

“So, you don’t think he was smart enough or adventurous enough to do this.”

She blinked. “I didn’t—”

“But that _is_ what you meant,” he pressed. “You just said that he was a boring, average student who had no real ideas of his own.”

“If that’s how you’d construe it, then go ahead,” she sighed. “He wasn’t a standout student.”

Ginoza brought up Rosei’s academic record. “Indeed. He never underperformed, nor did he overperform. However—” he showed a bar chart. “This is his attendance record. He would miss classes here and there, as every student would, yet, he never missed one of _your_ classes, Ms. de Certeau. Not even one in the two courses you administered to him.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say about that,” she wasn’t rattled—at least not outwardly. Her hue reading could tell the real story—Shion was already monitoring it remotely though the scanner-equipped security cameras.

“It looks rather suspicious; as though he was enamoured with your ideas or with _you_ ,” Ginoza said. “If we agree that Rosei was not the type of student to mastermind this kind of act, then who’d be the one to influence him?”

“When would I have the time?” Avicenna laughed.

“What do you teach about?” Kogami asked. “In your own words, not in the approved syllabi.”

“Sociocultural theory, history and qualitative research,” she said. “Old-fashioned topics but deemed necessary for a holistic education.”

“When we discussed the case earlier, we thought that the attack was one on the whole system. It sought to undermine Sibyl’s societal balance, to show that they are above its judgement.”

“These aren’t just show-offs,” Kagari said thoughtfully. “There was a bigger point here. It’s too organised for just a ‘fuck you’ to the system.”

“Okay, so we’ll run this through again. The explosion targeted a commencement ceremony for a new department,” Kogami said. “The department of Psychosocial Studies and Testing, which was meant to broaden work into how hues can be maintained through psychological intervention and social engineering. So, in a way, Gino is right that the attack was on the system, but it was also meant to target, take out and intimidate key people in this research area.” He looked across to Avicenna. “Did you know these people?”

“Not well, but I knew their research.”

“Can we get their papers?” Kogami asked, briefly breaking eye contact to face Ginoza, who nodded. “What did you think about their work?”

“That it was deterministic post-hoc nonsense,” she said flatly. “But I would wager I’m not the only one. The field generally erases the social factors surrounding hue degradation and frames them as individual responsibility outside of ideological or institutional cause. It’s been a heated debate in universities for longer than Sibyl has existed.”

“So, these are likely well-read people?” Ginoza asked. “Perhaps more former students or members of your faculty.”

“Perhaps,” she shrugged. “But most of us are acutely aware that our academic freedoms were being curtailed whenever we were perceived as a threat. Someone with nothing left to lose or no stake in this fight may have also done this—the attack just put more scrutiny on us.”

“Wait, you said that you think hue clouding has a societal and institutional cause—so that means you think Sibyl has a hand in it?” Kagari asked with an impish smile.

Avicenna looked at him with neutral eyes, her voice calm and collected. “I’m a proponent of the sociological imagination[i]. I think inequalities are sometimes so steeped into systems that they are rendered hard to notice or connect without effort. That the murkiness helps us frame their products as anomalies rather than patterns.”

“ _The common wretchedness of different men **[ii]**._” Kogami said.

For a moment, her dark brows lifted in recognition and surprise. “This was the last place I expected to hear Fanon, but yes.”

“Those are deeply held ideas,” Kogami put out the stub of his cigarette, “ones that aren’t just meant to be thought-experiments or published papers. This is how you view the world, right? Would you have influenced your students in the same direction? Isn’t it possible that your contempt leaked through and you were radicalising them? It just takes one young guy, used to being ignored and who’s in love with his pretty teacher to take her thoughts on philosophy and make them a reality,”

He hit the nerve he was aiming for—she immediately looked deeply insulted. “I wouldn’t sacrifice my student like that. I wouldn’t take advantage of the power I had over any of them to use them as cannon-fodder.”

“Then maybe your bias against this new department made you miss the signs. After all, the fact that this field was being given its own space specifically undermined _your_ specialties, right?” he leaned onto the desk, closing the distance slightly. As if on cue, she rolled her chair backwards. “You had a duty to report on strange occurrences and you missed this—on purpose or not. Don’t you think that needs investigating?”

“I wouldn’t have let him kill himself,” she said sternly.

“But you did,” he pressed. “Incompetence doesn’t make it any different—he was under your care and now he’s dead, and he’ll be remembered as a murderer.”

Her mouth stiffened into a thin line; she didn’t betray very much—at least not to the average observer, but Kogami picked up the little signs of distress: the slight struggle to keep her eyes on his, the surreptitious way she seemed to be kneading her fingernails into the palm of her hand to self-soothe, and most subtly, the slow, methodical breathing that she seemed to be working to maintain.

Ginoza broke the silence between them. “Ms. de Certeau, I’ve received word that your quarters are ready in the Enforcer dormitory. You’ll be shown there, where you’ll find some of your personal effects. You may request more of your things but they will have to be approved before we can procure them for you.”

The quick change of pace had the intended effect—as her mind attempted to change gears, the sense of discomfort and anxiety in her mannerisms grew for a moment. She shook her head a little, as though trying to wake herself up and muttered a word of acknowledgement.

“Kunizuka, take her to the dormitory and explain how life in the compound works,” Ginoza said stiffly. “Your first shift begins this evening, Ms. de Certeau, and I expect that you’ll be prepared.”

As soon as the pair left, Gino brought Shion on the central com. “What did you see?”

“Nothing much,” Shion said. “Her stress level went up a tiny bit here and there, but it just slowly lowered itself. Her hue didn’t budge.”

“She took the whole thing better than I thought,” Kagari said, before angling himself closer to the com receiver, “did you see how cute she is?”

“She is very cute,” Shion agreed. “Did you all get anything useful at least?”

Ginoza looked towards the Enforcers expectantly. “Well? Did you hounds pick up on something?”

“She’s hypervigilant, that’s for one,” Kogami said.

Kagari nodded. “Never saw someone with that kind of paranoia who wasn’t like us...unless of course you count the inspectors,” he broke off with a little grin towards Ginoza, who scowled.

“I could have pointed that out,” he said. “She was a refugee from a war-zone. The behaviours she learned in her early life are likely routine to her now. Move on.”

“It’s still noteworthy,” Kogami said. “Her awareness extends past constant fear. From what I can tell, she controls herself well; she’d probably respond better than most civilians if she was attacked.”

“What do you mean?” Kagari squinted at the screen, where they were able to track Yayoi and Avicenna’s progress as they walked through the building. “Like she was trained?”

“No, but I definitely think she’s been in a few physical confrontations before,” Kogami said. “Look,” he pointed to her; she leaned against a table in the fitness room as Yayoi spoke. “Always facing the door, always standing out of reach when talking to people.”

“It reminds me of folks we’d make a point of following or keeping an eye on,” Masaoka said. “The ones who were a little too aware of their surroundings.”

“It’s a hunch,” Ginoza said dismissively. “How would you prove it, and secondly, even if you did, what relevance would it have?”

“At its simplest, it could help us explain why she handled the terrorist attack so well. If we can use this, then this might be the lead we were looking for. If she was just a bystander, this level of controlled hypervigilance might help us; if she noticed something, even if she didn’t perceive it as a threat properly at the time, she could give us valuable information. She’d have been aware enough during the event to remember things more clearly,” he said.

“Maybe a cognitive interview?” Shion suggested. “We could try the more…traumatising method, but if she’s innocent, then it could tank her hue.”

“We’ll see if just an interview is sufficient,” Ginoza agreed. “Does this mean that none of you believe she was involved?”

Kagari shook his head. “She’s a little paranoid, but my first impression is no, I don’t think so.”

“Neither do I,” Masaoka said. “Her grief for her student's death looked real. I can’t see her handing him a bomb and sending him off to die.”

Kogami tapped another cigarette from his pack. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“Then either you’re off your game,” Ginoza said, “or you’ve seen something that the other two haven’t.”

“Right now, it’s intuition. She’s hiding a lot of things—maybe she is involved and has been faking her hue somehow. Or maybe Pops is right, and she’ll lose it one day when the delayed trauma hits. I’ll need some time to get it fleshed out,”

“Well do it quickly, because we have a terrorist group to find.”

\---

That evening, Kogami made his way through the dormitory, his mind had already gone on ahead of him—to that wall in his bedroom where the assorted conjectures and evidence was haphazardly displayed. He knew it was too early in the investigation, but there was a sense of peculiarity in this crime—the same one that he’d gotten in the Specimen Case, and the scattered others that carried that uncanny feeling. It was as though the pieces _logically_ made sense, but there was a bit of the picture missing—the final element that could reveal these obscured details. The other cases were executed by latent criminals who otherwise would have taken years to execute their crimes to that level—if at all. They’d been given help. Not an accomplice, per se…this aid seemed to be more distant than that. Speculative. Each day, Kogami rehearsed those cases in his head. He stared at that blurry photo, and wracked his brain for any hint towards who this ‘Makishima’ that Sasayama had found was.

What he needed to do now, was to truly discover whether Avicenna de Certeau was the brain behind the event. From how well she handled his prodding and from her general demeanour, she was certainly intelligent enough to create a complex plan. With her open distaste for the people targeted, she also had the motive—however, Masaoka and Kagari were right. She didn’t seem like the type, just as she had said her student wasn’t the type to be a terrorist mastermind either. What they had missed, though, was that uncanny ability for self-control; Kogami was skilled enough to realise she was putting up a front, but he had little clue what was underneath it. The only tells she allowed thus far were few—little bits of anxiety or irritation here and there.

He paused before the stairwell that would take him down to his room in the lowest dormitory level—he usually occupied the time walking with more thoughts about the day, preferring to avoid running into anyone else in the elevators. An idea struck him, and he decided to take the chance and continue his work from earlier that morning. Avicenna’s room wasn’t subterranean like his—they seemed invested enough in trying to keep her happy in there by providing her an apartment with a window. It was on the third floor, all the way down to the end—empty apartments all around. The brass seemed to be rather conflicted about why they brought her here. If they thought she was a latent criminal who had somehow managed to hide her score, there would be no need to safeguard her hue by giving her a sunny room or by keeping her generally apart from the other Enforcers. Yet—they were doing it anyway. It all felt like an experiment, with carefully controlled variables; he imagined Division One functioned as one itself.

The door to the room was open, probably to help it air out as it had lapsed into dormancy for some time. He leaned against the door frame and rapped his knuckle on the door; Avicenna was still in her dark pantsuit, sitting with her legs tucked under her on the floor, surrounded by boxes. She looked quite small among them, content to hide in the clutter with a book in hand.

She gazed up at him, confused. “Mr. Kogami, is it?”

“Yeah,” he gave the place a cursory look. Cheerful, with the added sunlight, but still a prison. “I supposed as old-fashioned as your field is, I shouldn’t be surprised that you use physical books.”

“It only gets annoying when you have to move,” she sighed. “I was able to bring a few things from my office and from my home, but most of my reading material was left.”

“What’s that one? Seemed interesting enough to make you stop going through the others.”

“Hegel, Haiti and Universal History,” she held it out. “Linking the master-slave dialectic to an actual revolt of enslaved people at the time, instead of just the French Revolution and the Reformation.”

“I heard about this in the university,” he flipped open the obviously well-thumbed book. “Why do you like it so much?”

“It reminds me about how far-reaching some influences can be, and that grand ideas can trace their roots back to things that end up largely ignored by history. It just means we need to uncover them.”

“Is it useful here?” Kogami looked up from the pages.

“It is when I have to teach about Hegel,” she said with a smile—not the answer he was looking for, and she knew it. It seemed further discussions about her views would have to wait. Avicenna got to her feet, stretching slightly before she scooped a pile of neatly folded clothes from a box, and walked to the open dresser. Kogami flipped through more pages of the book, wondering yet again about the case and its possible connections to a singular puppet master.

“Someone under your care died on your watch, right?” she asked, closing the drawer. She was considering him with a measuring eye—clearly aware that she was stepping onto thin ice.

It was his turn to feel picked at—he simply looked at her with raised brows and what he could already feel as a forbidding stare. “Why do you ask? I’m just an Enforcer.”

“There was just something about the way you asked those questions,” she said. “You and Mr. Ginoza also look like you’ve known one another for a while—”

“And you checked up on my academic record when you heard that you were being placed in Division One,” he finished for her. “I’m surprised that you managed to get my name out of someone and do that so quickly with the little time they gave you in your office.”

She had the grace to flush slightly in embarrassment. “I like knowing the lay of the land. I saw your alumnus record; it showed that you transitioned into the MWPSB training school.”

“I was an Inspector,” he said. “Not uncommon for us to end up here,”

“Is that why you asked me that question?” she probed. “About whether I feel responsible.”

“No,” he said simply. “I asked it because it was a good way to see if you felt guilty or if you were lying about knowing his intentions. It was supposed to put you in a vulnerable state, so you’d give up more information, but that didn’t work.”

“Is it too much to ask what you think now?” Avicenna turned her wristcom around idly.

He thought that perhaps, he should be suitably cryptic to keep her psychologically unsettled, but there was something about the lonesome way he’d found her that made him take the honest route. She wasn’t an ordinary woman—but she seemed so out of place here. Like a prey animal amongst wolves.

“I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind yet,” he said. “Aren’t you going to ask me who died under my watch?”

“No,” she checked the time, and made her way to the door—it was almost second shift. “I didn’t think you’d appreciate it.”

“Even after the hard time I gave you today? You could have thrown it in my face during the questioning.” He followed her to the hall.

“But then you wouldn’t like me, and we’d never get to talk about where you read Fanon,” she smiled. “I’ll see you around, Mr. Kogami.”

He watched her disappear around the corner, his thoughts abuzz with mingled confusion and intent. She was a tough one to pin down—but like a hunting dog that had scented its quarry, he would be persistent until the job was done. It was his job—but there was also a special sort of thrill in the chase. It wasn’t often that he met someone who was so adept at hiding themselves, but Kogami found that he relished a challenge.

* * *

[i] Mills, C. W. (1959). The Promise. In Sociological Imagination.

[ii] Fanon, F. (1964). Racism and Culture. In Toward the African Revolution (pp. 30–44).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Avicenna gets her first name from the Persian philosopher (and polymath!) Ibn Sina, and her last name from the French philosopher Michel de Certeau :) 
> 
> 'Senna' (千凪) is an adapted Japanese name, as a few of the naturalised refugees we've seen (like Kei) seem to have short, Japanese names in addition to their original ones.
> 
> As Senna's name is foreign, and language differences come up several times in the series, I've decided that it would make the most sense for the characters to say her name as "Avicenna de Certeau", rather than putting the last name first. This is both a stylistic choice and also as a way for speakers to subtly denote her as a foreign subject.


	3. Bellum omnium contra omnes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Division one continues their investigation, and its members get a feel for their temporary colleague.
> 
> Avicenna develops a bit of a Kogami-complex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our chapter title comes from Thomas Hobbes; it means “the war of all against all”, signifying what Hobbes thinks of human nature. He felt that human nature led humans to eternal war and brutish, short lives—unless they were brought together by strong a ruler or government that could inspire awe. 
> 
> ;) Very fitting for Sibyl.

_“Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called Warre; and such a Warre, as is of every man, against every man.” Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan” 1651._

_“The State is but the shadow of man, the shadow of his opaqueness, of his ignorance, and fear.” Emma Goldman, “The Individual, Society and the State”, 1940[i]._

There was a threshold in each person—a thin line that denoted when tiredness and overstimulation became crippling exhaustion. Senna had become self-aware to the point that she _knew_ how extended she was, even through the effort to hide her symptoms. Her first shift at the MWPSB consisted mainly of revisiting the case’s evidence; Enforcer Masaoka was her sole guide in this venture, taking on the task with rather high spirits. Even then, she could tell that each move she made—each change in expression was being monitored. Senna had become used to being watched—it was a fact of life in this society. Though, she was one of the few people who had adapted to scrutiny before entering it. Still, it took a mental toll, and she felt herself begin to wilt by the end of the shift.

Masaoka shut down his terminal, leaving the room in near-darkness. “Our analyst is still going through the video footage of the lecture hall. There must be a clue about who put those bombs, but somehow the algorithms haven’t picked up anything. We might get an update tomorrow once she looks everything over herself.”

“Sometimes human eyes are the best, huh?” she said idly, toying with the button on her jacket. The pictures—the sight of the bodies and the post-mortem reports still lingered. She hadn’t been alone since the attack—and had thus been unable to let any of it sink in. Her brain had gone right back to _disaster mode_ , where everything deemed troublesome was placed far, far behind the need to keep moving forward. The routine way she’d slipped back into that old habit was disconcerting, but she was grateful that it remained almost second nature. The practice made her feel distant from her thoughts, as though perceiving the world through a thick layer of glass.

“Yeah,” Masaoka agreed, his gruff voice dropping to a low murmur. “I don’t like all this programming doing our work for us—too easy to fool it.”

 _Ha_. _The same way I’m fooling it now, I guess_. Senna followed him through the hallway.

“How long have you been an Enforcer?” she asked quietly.

“Lost count. Let me think,” he cocked his head to one side. “Since 2093.”

“I would have been five,” she said.

 _Five and already on the run_. The realisation that they’d both been living in hell for nearly the same amount of time softened her slightly towards him. A small glimmer of sympathy that made her chest tight.

“Same age Shu was when he was labelled a latent criminal,” Masaoka said. “You’re pretty damn lucky the system never flagged you,”

 _Lucky_. The sterile surroundings of the MWPSB suddenly reminded her far too much of the facility she’d passed a year of her life within. The little bits and pieces came back, the astringent, clean smell of ethanol—the clicking of scanners each morning and the sad, almost disappointed beep that all the girls could hear when one of them failed. What society could be so cruel? To think that it even did this its own children.

The young Enforcer’s immature, mischievous demeanour suddenly made a lot more sense.

Senna glanced at the older man, whose face was obscured in half-shadow as they walked towards the dormitory compound. “Flagging a child is excessive.”

At her tone, a piece clicked into place in his head. “Right, right, you got put into one of the integration schools,” he looked over his shoulder; they entered the dormitories, which had fallen silent at the late hour. “How many of your classmates got taken?”

“Like you, I lost count,” she told him. “But I don’t think they got put away.”

He paused—his expression darkened. “They executed them.”

“‘Euthanised’ was the term.”

He let out a long sigh. “I don’t think machines should be making our judgements for us. ‘Specially not life and death ones. So, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that was fair.”

“Thanks. Is that how you ended up here, too, then? When the system was instituted, it just became too much?”

“Something like that. Maybe they’re right, and thinking like a criminal to catch one is just a slippery slope. Or maybe I just couldn’t accept the system.”

“I don’t think empathising with a criminal makes you a criminal,” Senna remarked. “Even if you actually end up understanding them well enough to feel bad for them. Empathy is a good thing. A human thing. Justice should never be without compassion.”

“Well, maybe not always good if it makes you end up like me,” he smiled. “But even if your student was a terrorist or whatever—you must be grieving. So, my condolences.”

She paused—was it a test? Would he be watching her hawkishly, waiting to report on any overly sympathetic feelings she displayed? Senna found her thoughts sluggish—her eyes already heavy with the weight of the past week; she could not look directly at him as she responded.

“Thank you. No one’s even mentioned it. They just forgot that he was a person too.”

“Must be difficult to reconcile that he could do something like this,” Masaoka continued. “The kid you knew versus the things we say he did. I’m sure you’ve spent time going it all over in your head trying to make it make sense.”

“Honestly?” Senna allowed herself a moment to breathe, to let the frustration and confusion leak through, if only slightly. “I just feel sad that someone so young is gone. It does feel a little wrong to be more torn up over his death than any of the others, but to me, he was still on his way to becoming a person. I don’t think he had to end up this way.”

“You think he was manipulated,”

“I do,” she agreed. “And I’m invested in helping you all find out who.”

“Even if you think the world is better off without the people who died?” he paused in the hallway, studying her intently, with both hands tucked into his pockets. The old Enforer’s gaze was level—cunning but almost collegial.

Too worn down for a lie, Senna relented. “Even so.”

“Well then,” he accepted it unflinchingly. A smile spread across his face, highlighting the lines at the corner of his eyes. “I think with that out of the way, you and I should have a drink.”

“A drink?”

“The best way to wash away a shitty day. I’ll bring a bottle to your apartment.”

\---

The alcohol had imparted a dreamless sleep—it seemed she had closed her eyes for only a moment when her alarm blared again. She sat bolt upright, fumbling to turn it off while staring in confusion at the strange surroundings before her memory caught up. Slumping back into the sheets, she covered her eyes with one hand. Rosei Gunshi’s face flickered across the sleepy darkness, and she felt her stomach drop. That kid. Not much younger than her—but he was just that, a _kid_. Like so many she’d known through life, he was chewed up and spit out by an unforgiving world. Alone—she was able to just _feel_ the weight of it all, to let the annoyance, the frustration and the helplessness mingle. She was so, so angry—at her former student, at the system and this nameless, faceless person who told him to throw his life away for their own gain. She wanted to go back to those lectures, to shake him and ask whether or not it was worth it.

Senna abhorred this sort of thing. She’d seen it too often—watched people get taken in and thrown down the road to their own demise. Coming to Japan seemed like her own version of this walk in its own way—but she’d made it this far. She learned from the mistakes of others and clawed her continued existence day by day. Senna dragged herself out of bed towards the neatly stocked kitchenette. The MWPSB had provided a relatively bland variety of things—standard fare that was palatable for almost anyone. She squeaked tiredly as she put a knee onto the cold counter, straining to dig a mug from the depths of the high cabinet. As was the norm, her room was equipped with a drink dispenser—not terrible, but she would have to convince Inspector Ginoza let her purchase a kettle and actual tea. Waiting for her synthetic tea to cool enough to drink, she brushed her teeth, sitting on the edge of her bed as she took in the contours of her new prison. It wasn’t lost on her that the bureau took the first opportunity to force her hand…after all, they’d been intrigued about her psychological resilience for years.

But that was it, wasn’t it? It wasn’t natural resilience. It was an illusion.

Senna washed her face. Not much had changed, really. She was always surrounded by people who searched for weakness—this setting was just different. Whether it was just a strange group who’d stumbled on their camp out in the forest—or someone like Enforcer Kogami, those cold, calculating eyes were keenly tuned to find a way in. Senna had developed her own way of hiding what she was feeling—it began as a makeshift method to not stand out as an easy target. It was only when she was being processed at the border that she discovered this process worked against the Sibyl system as well. It wasn’t particularly complicated—it just took practice. Senna could fake many emotions, and she could bury her own far, far beneath even her own notice. They all leaked out eventually—after all, this took effort to do, and repression wasn’t particularly healthy, but it was a proper mechanism that helped her survive. It had become such a part of her; she wondered which parts were even _her_ anymore—and which were created.

_Was there even a difference?_

Like most skills, being well-rested and generally in good health helped keep the façade up. When Senna lived nomadically with her parents, the mask came on when they needed it. Now, it seemed to rarely leave. Even here, as she chewed her generic, tasteless breakfast and sipped her bland tea far away from prying eyes, she felt the instinct to keep it all hidden. Tonight, she’d put up her dartboard. It would keep her occupied and her aim good—and it would give her some way to get the anger out. She had experienced a breakdown from being too overwhelmed only a few times—and it was never pretty. In this place, it would be something to avoid at all costs, unless she had a death wish. She pulled on the dark suit and a white shirt, digging through a box to find her small makeup satchel. Idly, she wondered if in one of those moments of complete emotional deluge—if her criminal coefficient would be high. And even then, would that be the real her? She brushed it off as she opened the door—leaving her new little sanctuary behind. The mask came on again.

With a low, slow breath, she felt herself relax. The world was placed behind its pane of glass, and she observed it from a safe distance.

Today was easier than the others; whether it was because she’d slept unwatched—or because she spoke with Enforcer Masaoka, she wasn’t sure. He was the easiest to read of the lot. Masaoka was old school indeed—in fact, he reminded her of many people she knew before coming to Japan. She couldn’t yet tell if he could be trusted, but they passed several hours sipping liquor and talking during the night before. He told her about his hobbies and a bit about his fellow Enforcers—but had carefully avoided the case. It was as though he’d left work behind him. She wished she could have believed it and put down the wall—but it felt impossible. Senna had forgotten how to have friends, and she knew it. The MWPSB seemed like less than an ideal place to start learning again.

“Good morning!” Kagari, the bronze-haired, energetic Enforcer grinned widely as she entered the office. “Did Pops bore you to tears during your shift?”

“It was fine,” she answered. Now this one was duplicitous; she could spot it from a mile away. His playfulness was meant more to unsettle or annoy others than placate them, but she could glimpse little bits of maturity—of darkness beneath it. She recalled what Masaoka had told her about him—he’d been relegated to an institution when he was _five_.

Senna took her seat, glancing first at the workspace that lay directly behind her own. Enforcer Kogami’s desk was stacked with ash-trays, stacks of folders—and something that had escaped her notice the first time— _books_. They were almost all in English, which had only just registered as strange. The tiredness and skittishness had made her miss things; he’d even flipped through and read her book, which had also been in English. She winced internally. This couldn’t keep happening, especially not around someone like him. He had the sharp, probing eyes of skilled predator, yet he intrigued her. Like a moth to a flame, perhaps, she wanted to know the extent of the danger he posed.

And to put it more simply, she’d never quite met anyone like him in her life.

“He’d let you borrow one of them if you asked,” Kagari said, breaking her out of her reverie.

“What?”

“Ko. You’re looking at his books like you’re trying to X-ray them.”

Senna kicked herself. She was doing it _again_ , and he wasn’t even here. “I’m just surprised that he reads paper books.”

“He doesn’t look like a nerd, but he is,” Kagari said, thumbs clicking away on his handheld game. “Although most girls who take notice of him don’t do it for _that_.”

Too used to teaching eighteen and nineteen year olds, Senna didn’t flinch at the accusation. Kagari had glimpsed up from his screen to gauge her reaction and frowned in disappointment. The door slid open, and in walked the wolf himself, one hand in his pocket, the other with a cigarette to his lips.

“Don’t tell me you have a boyfriend waiting for you out there,” Kagari sighed dramatically.

“Do you think lecturers have a lot of time?” Senna asked mildly, preferring to address him than the newly-arrived Kogami. The latter took his seat, snuffing out the cigarette smoothly as he started up the terminal, seemingly nonplussed by their strange conversation. The smell of smoke wafted across to her side of the desk. She was going to stink of cigarettes at this rate.

“So that’s a no?” Kagari’s smile brightened. “That’s good to know.”

Senna stared at him. He was a little shit, no doubt about it—but something about his childishness made it hard to be annoyed with him. Maybe it was because Masaoka had told her about his life—or maybe he just reminded her of her sophomorish charges back at the institute.

“Did you first shift go smoothly?” Kogami asked, looking at her intently.

“It did, Mr. Masaoka was very helpful,” she said.

“Pops is such a softie,” Kagari added. “All hard-boiled detective on the outside, marshmallow on the inside.”

“Did you think of anything after going over the evidence?”

Ah—there they were again, firmly back into work. “Only that I agree it’s strange for the footage to show no signs of someone interfering with the chairs,” she said. “And it signals that we _do_ have at least one other person involved here, and at worst-case, a group of specialists.”

“You think that the terrorists would have had to doctor the video,” Kogami said thoughtfully. “Why don’t you think that the bombs were put under the chairs before they were placed in the hall?”

“Aside from the fact that you’d have thought of that,” she said. “I know what explosives look like, unfortunately. The men setting up the room would not have missed them when moving the chairs.”

“Refugee life sounds really intense,” Kagari said. “I guess we can only hope Shion finds the spot that was doctored. Whoever did it must have been _really_ good if it slipped past the programmes.”

“How long would something like that take?” Senna asked.

“Even for a skilled editor, hours—even days.” Kogami said.

“So, then maybe the new recording overwrote the original close to the event,” Senna suggested. “The hall was used for a fair just a week before the attack, so with the cleanup, the chairs were only installed about three days beforehand.”

Kogami’s steely gaze shifted slightly—he looked a little impressed. “That’s good. It means that Shion can focus on a smaller amount of time. If she goes through the network records with a fine-toothed comb, maybe she might be able to pick up on the person who did the swapping if they got careless.”

“Plus,” she said. “If we know what time the new recording was uploaded, and we can locate Rosei somewhere else…”

“Then it confirms that he wasn’t just a lone actor,” Kogami nodded. He had a slight smile now, and Senna vaguely registered that it made her ever-so-slightly self-conscious.

Kagari had put his game down, and was looking between them in awe. “Well, damn.”

\---

Senna had been right. Later in the morning they stepped out of the MWPSB and into Inspector Ginoza’s pristine squad car, she registered that she could still faintly smell cigarettes, even before Kogami had taken the front seat. She frowned at the back of his head as the car set off.

“When we arrive at the house, I will take the lead,” Ginoza said. “You will ask questions as necessary, and observe closely Ms. de Certeau.”

She made a small noise of assent. “Have they been able to bury him?”

They were on their way to meet Rosei Gunshi’s parents—to interrogate them, really, about their son’s activities. Senna felt generally uncomfortable with the prospect, but she wanted to know the truth.

“No, his remains are still lodged in the MWPSB,” Ginoza said. “Why?”

“They might be a little antsy about that,” Kogami answered for her. “I think if we frame this well, we can get them to be more co-operative if we suggest that doing so will speed up the process of getting their son back.”

Ginoza’s eyes studied her in the rearview-mirror, over his spectacles. “Was that what you had in mind?”

“Not in as harsh a way,” she admitted. “But yes.”

“You think too closely like a latent criminal,” he told her—his voice was calm, though it carried a sense of forboding. “Take note of this before your hue suffers.”

“I thought she was sent here to us because her hue was resilient, Gino,” Kogami glanced at the Inspector, who seemed to bristle slightly.

“Even so, Enforcer. She isn’t one of you, and she should be cautious of _becoming_ one of you.”

\---

“Gunshi wasn’t the sort to do something like this,” the young man’s mother wrung her hands, preferring to stare at their lined surface than at the MWPSB members. Nearby, her husband sat despondently. Senna could guess that they were receiving intensive therapy and psychopharmacological care—there would be only a small grace period for their pain, before it became deemed latent criminality.

Ginoza continued to push them slightly. “How was it that your son managed to avoid all of the cymatic scanners in the area? He still visited home, didn’t he?”

Mrs. Rosei’s hands tightend. “He was home just that weekend. I don’t even know where the scanners are in our neighbourhood—”

“Gunshi was always quiet,” her husband finally said. “With a clear hue since childhood. You understand why we think that you have this wrong.”

“If your son had nothing to hide, why would he avoid being scanned?” Kogami asked.

Rosei Gunshi’s parents reacted to that immediately—Senna could almost see their hues cloud with the amount of stress that leaked through. Mrs. Rosei had twisted her face into a tight grimace, as though warding off tears, while Mr. Rosei shifted his stare from outside of the window, straight to Kogami.

“There is a mistake,” he said, growing louder with each word. “If you continue looking, you’ll see, he was a victim—”

“He was probably taken advantage of,” Senna volunteered quietly. Kogami had wound them up with a precision strike—it was cruel, but she knew it had opened the door for her to provide a thread of comfort. In this state, especially knowing that their hues were clouding, they would be almost sure to take it.

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Rosei raised her head at last, her eyes were bloodshot and swollen.

“I was one of his teachers,” she said. “I also knew him to be a quiet kid. Perhaps we should see his room? The more information we can get about him, the faster we can bring him home to you.”

That struck a chord. Mrs. Rosei’s eyes snapped to her husband, who was still breathing heavily from being riled up by Kogami.

“Miss—?” she began, trailing off with uncertainty.

“Senna is fine.”

“What did you know about him? What did you think about him?”

Senna chose her words carefully, but she was honest. Her heart bled for these people—their entire world had been rocked, changed irrevocably. This could mean the end for them. “He was shy and average. Apparently he never missed a single one of my classes,” she smiled to them. “He wasn’t one for enthusiasm or prone to trying to show off; he just quietly sat there and did his work. People tend to think that teachers only remember the loud or genius students, but we see the others too. He kept to himself and would come to see me when he needed it—you see, he always followed instructions.”

“Yes,” she began to cry. “That was him. He was simple and good.”

“I know,” Senna said. “That’s why we want to know who intructed him to throw his life away, and why he would even do it.”

Mrs. Rosei continued to blink silently, trying to keep her own tears from clouding her vision. It was her husband who finally spoke.

“Okay, please, go to his room. It is the fourth door on the right. I also made a study for him out of my old workroom when I retired, it is right next door.”

Senna nodded to them, bowing slightly. That last remark—it made her feel slightly ill. She imagined the elderly Mr. Rosei, helping to erect shelves, clearing a desk—providing his son with a nice, quiet place to be. They loved their son. They had raised him to be earnest, kind and they did not care about aptitude or flashiness. She rose from the sofa and walked to the hallway, looking to Inspector Ginoza for further instruction.

“You and Kogami can handle this,” he said. “I will look at the rest of the residence.”

“The rest of the residence?” Senna asked quietly.

“We must also focus on the parents. After all, an obedient child would do his mother or father’s bidding without question, wouldn’t he?”

She knew it was logical. It was necessary, to be sure that nothing was amiss. Still, she found the prospect revolting. Senna wordlessly followed the Enforcer, first to the bedroom. Kogami closed the door behind him, scanning the room with his sharp gaze.

“You have a soft spot for the elderly,” he said.

“Who doesn’t?”

The room was neat—spotless, really. There was only one mussed place on the bed, where it looked as though someone had sat a the edge. Likely one of his parents, Senna thought with a sigh. Scattered around in various places, were vestiges of a short life; digital pictures shone brightly in their frames—of this little family throughout all of the expected milestones. His parents had him late in life, but he never seemed to chafe at their old-fashioned ways. The two combed over the small room. He had no virtual reality apparati, no hidden caches of illicit things. He seemed to be a fan of drawing, evidenced by a neat collection of several weights of pencil and books of sketches. Kogami piled them all onto the table.

“We’ll need to analyse these, they should help us narrow our psychological profile.”

Senna looked at the mismatched stack. “It’s funny how we can put every aspect of a person under a microscope. Even their hobbies.”

“It’s a necessary specialty,” he said. “That’s how I know that your empathy for this kid’s parents is because you miss your own.”

“That seems like a pretty obvious one,” she told him, unlocking the tablet on the bedside table, “I half expected you to say that the shade of my nailpolish tells you something about what I eat for breakfast.”

“Not quite,” he sounded amused. “I can tell that you didn’t do them yourself, though. Too uniform. From your academic life and job record, you seem to do things until you’re very good at them as a rule. So that means you really hate painting your nails.”

Senna paused mid-swipe on the tablet. “You’re kidding me.”

“Nope.”

“Is this where I mention that your constant smoking means you have an oral fixation?”

She registered a faint sound of amusement—rather like a soft, short chuckle. “Freud is low-hanging fruit. Try again.”

“You read a lot of English books,” she said. “You know Fanon well enough to quote him off the top of your head. I think you’re unsatisfied with what you’ve been taught here.”

“Isn’t everyone curious on some level?”

“Not enough to read print books in a foreign language. You got them because you’d have never found them localised in Japanese and digitally under the system.”

“Good work,” he said. He made a hum of consideration that caused her to abandon her task of rifling through the tablet. “He’s been drawing for some time. Lots of landscapes, a few sketches of his parents, some of the institute. It looks like a sort of calming mechanism. Like he does this to think.” He paused, pulling one of the pages out. “He has a sketch of you.”

Senna started from her spot. She walked over, half intrigued, half apprehensive. It was unmistakably her—gathering papers at her lectern. It was a silhouette that looked a bit unfinished, as though it had been quickly mapped out, with only minimal detail being added from memory.

“Look at the date.”

She considered it for a few minutes, wracking her brain to remember what they’d been doing in class on that day—

“This was the first course I taught him; it was our review class. Before the exam.”

“I see.” Kogami placed the page separately from the others. “You mentioned that you taught history, right?”

Senna looked up in surprise. “I don’t think so—”

“Yeah, that was how you phrased it. Not the geneaology of our society, not the growth of the Sibyl system—you called it _history_ ,” he continued. “Not a lot of people would, since it’s never taught that way.”

She sighed. “I teach the approved syllabus, of course.”

“And you know what history really means. Do they line up?”

A beat passed between them.

“They’re two vastly different things. Not necessarily contradictory, but kept so separate that they may as well be. So that’s why you kept bombarding me with questions—you wanted me to slip up and use terms a normal Japanese citizen wouldn’t.”

“Well, you’re not a normal Japanese citizen,” he said, “but you’re right. I was probing to build an idea of how you see the world.”

“And you still don’t know what to think.”

He considered her, eyes netural and calm. “I don’t think questioning the Sibyl system or the way things are done here automatically makes you a possible terrorist.” He gathered up the sketchbooks, placing hers paper in the top one. “Let’s tackle the study.”

“Mr. Kogami,”

Pausing mid-stride, he glanced over his shoulder, eyebrow quirked to signal that he was listening.

“What does Rosei Gunshi having that sketch say about me?”

“For now, I just think that you inspired him.”

With that, he walked out, leaving her there to feel a mixture of shock and strange sadness.

* * *

[i] I chose this quote by Emma Goldman to contrast to Hobbes, who thinks that the State or a ruler is the only way to avoid war and strife. Goldman, an anarchist, posits that the State is merely an invented concept and is in fact representative of our _worst_ impulses rather than being the mechanism that keeps us from them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really love how Avicenna is shaping up a character, ugh. I wanted to toy with the idea of an empathetic person, who at the same time is used to hiding her own feelings. I especially think it would be interesting for a character like this to meet someone who is adept at seeing through people, especially when she has worn her mask so much that she begins to doubt who she is.
> 
> I've written more scenes here and there, and her Kogami-complex just created itself haha. 
> 
> TL;DR: Sad-boi meets possibly even sadder gorl. Stay tuned for angst.


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